Old anti-margarine laws resurface and protect consumers as food companies add water to the food supply to hide shortages and price hikes.

Old anti-margarine laws resurface and protect consumers as food companies add water to the food supply to hide shortages and price hikes.

In the United States, the dairy industry has been influential enough over that years that in many states, it was illegal to sell margarine, or at least yellow margarine.

In Wisconsin, there are still anti-margarine laws on the books. One of them makes it illegal for the Sheriffs and the state agency managing the prisons to feed margarine to the prisoners.

As part of the anti-margarine laws, butter became a highly regulated product. There are different “grades” of butter, but the only kind you’re likely to come across in the stores are AA graded, which is the highest possible rating.

Margarine, in comparison, has no legal definition, and many companies are eschewing the “margarine” label even if some state has a definition. Simply calling something a “spread” or a “plant-based butter” or “buttery tasting spread” is undefined.

So it should come as no surprise when ConAgra decided to fill their “Smart Balance” product full of water, except that they figured consumers wouldn’t notice as big of a change as they tried to pull off and be angry.

Many of the reviews I’ve read say that the stuff is now semi-liquid or semi-solid, and it takes twice as much to cook with, and it doesn’t properly melt anymore.

Margarine, in my book, is a no-go in the kitchen anyway. It’s something that most people only ever bought for economic reasons or some seriously misplaced concern for their health.

(Margarine is not healthy, it just has different health hazards than real butter.)

Since butter is legally defined, there’s never any surprises when I take it home. If the cost to make it goes up, the price I pay at the store goes up, but it’s still butter, and I still get four sticks per box that add up to a pound.

While I was looking around, I noticed that food I buy at Walmart is gradually being replaced with water.

Some non-margarine examples are Stouffer’s Stuffed Peppers, which used to be very flavorful (for frozen dinner) and covered in a viscous and tasty tomato sauce.

I just made them for dinner tonight and my spouse said “Dinner was not good.”. I said, “I know, Stouffer’s used to be the best.”.

The stuffed peppers are so watery now that I tried to get them to my plate as they splayed and fell apart, and the meat/rice mixture was so loosely held together that the fork went through it way easier than you should be able to cut “meat”.

Somehow, they added 10 calories per serving vs. the pictured item on Walmart’s Web site.

I also noticed that Hellman’s Mayonnaise is being watered down.

They used to be the best Mayo you could buy at the store, and now they’re just the most expensive. They’re doing these gimmicky rebates like Stouffer’s is instead of maintaining product quality.

On the “Hellman’s Mayo with Avocado Oil”, it’s not even 100% Avocado oil that they use. If you look at the ingredients, water is the first ingredient, and then there is still soybean and canola oil.

There’s only a tiny amount of Avocado oil in there. Just enough to make an issue of it on the product label.

Hellman’s Mayo has actually been run into the ground now to the point where the Walmart store brand is actually better, and has more eggs and oils and less WATER, and it’s half the price.

I think what’s going on here are two things.

They don’t want to shrink the packages further because they know that customers are getting tired of that, and they’re onto them. They don’t want to increase prices, but they have, because Congress and Biden have ruined the US Dollar’s buying power with inflation, and so their last card to play is slip some water in and see if anyone makes a big fuss about it.

In at least the Smart Balance margarine case, “consumer” feedback was so strongly negative and sudden that they promised to have the old formulation back in stores by Winter. We’ll see.

It’s insulting that these companies think that they can slip this by people and will ultimately have customers buying their products again.

In the case of Stouffer’s, they’ve always been a life hack for when you don’t have time to make dinner yourself. For now, the stuffed peppers were the only awful product we’ve come across. I bought some others, on rebate.

We had the salisbury steaks last night and those are still okay. I didn’t think they were watery or using tricks to bulk up the meat to an egregious level, like the stuffed peppers I have a chicken lasagna we’ll get to eventually.

But the general trend in the grocery store is 30% higher prices Year over Year, and when you get home, you find out that they skimp on seasonings and slipped in water to hide the inflation.

I also noticed this going on in lunch meat. Brands that used to say “Contains up to 14% of a solution.” (water) They’re now up to 20%.

This actually makes me a lot angrier than them just admitting there’s inflation and giving me their former recipes.

Strange fluctuations in egg prices in the United States.

Strange fluctuations are happening in egg prices in the United States.

I suppose you could call it one part of the larger disaster of rising grocery prices, but since January, the price of eggs has more than doubled here.

In fact, while brown eggs are usually a lot more expensive (there is no difference in nutrient profile or protein quality….it’s literally just different kinds of hens and feed that produce different colors, and it’s a matter of regional preference), the disruption in the white egg market has left the situation inverted at Walmart.

At my local Walmart, you can buy a dozen brown eggs, Great Value, for $1.67, which is 13.9 cents each, but at the same time, a dozen white eggs are now 21.6 cents each, or $2.59.

In light of all the crazy things in the world that are unfolding, you’d think it would be odd to stop and consider egg prices, but I’m married to an Asian person who puts eggs in everything, so unless I want eggs to be the cause of a second bankruptcy (which would lead to an interesting conversation with the trustee, undoubtedly), I need to watch how I’m buying these things.

A month ago, I purchased 72 brown eggs.

This week, people seem to have caught on about the brown eggs, but at least the price of a 60 count carton of white eggs has fallen from $14.97 to $12.47. So I bought a 60 count carton of white eggs.

An interesting story about eggs was, the last time inflation was beginning to surge quite badly in the US, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered his Surgeon General to put out a press release that eating eggs was bad for cholesterol in the hope that people would buy less of them and the price would fall.

It was stupid and it didn’t work, like most things the government does.

The story stuck even though it was just the government bullshitting the public like it always does, and now some people swear off eggs and onto statin drugs like lambs to the slaughter.

You’d think that eating 60 or 70 eggs a month would send my cholesterol through the roof, but it’s the same as it ever was, which is just slightly above normal. Thankfully, I have an honest doctor who acknowledges the downside of going on statin drugs.

Statin drugs are not safe. They can lead to diabetes, memory loss, and joint and muscle pains.

They should be saved as an absolute last resort, but doctors push them on everyone and are contributing to the epidemics of Alzheimer’s Disease and various dementia, and diabetes, as if we Americans needed any help with that.

It won’t be the butter and eggs that kill you, it’ll be the damned doctors that are the end of us all. Fundamentally, people don’t change. At one point, doctors were hawking Camel cigarettes, and today it’s Lipitor.

I do have a problem with blood pressure, and I had to go see some quacks that don’t believe in prescribing blood pressure meds before I found the winning lottery ticket and got a decent doctor back in March, and as long as she’s in practice, I’m not going anywhere else.

If you can find good accountants, mechanics, and doctors, don’t ever leave willingly.